[LAD] automation on Linux (modular approach)

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Mon Mar 22 11:33:23 UTC 2010


fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:54:24PM +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>
>   
>> fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> And don't forget that 90% of all music that is still
>>> popular today has been produced without any form of
>>> automation, and even without the editing facilities
>>> that e.g. Ardour provides - just using 16 or 24-track
>>> tapes (and in many cases even less). If you can't do
>>> a decent fade-out manually you just have to learn and
>>> do it. Agreed, it's easier with a real P&G fader than
>>> with one you have to move by mouse.
>>>       
>> Full ACK and IMO it's not up to the audio engineer to fade, but it's
>> the task of the musician to play the instrument dynamically. In most
>> cases an audio engineer makes a mix that is kept for a whole song,
>> loud and silent passages are done by the artist, not by the
>> technician.
>>     
>
> That's certainly true for most of the music I love,
> but OTOH in practice as an audio engineer you are 
> supposed to solve problems created by circumstances
> out of your control. If a singer wants to redo one
> phrase of song and it ends up being a few dB louder
> than the rest you'll have to accept that - you can't
> ask to do it again just because of that. But it's no
> big deal. Either you just remember to push the fader
> at the right time, or today, using Ardour, you can
> just cut out that fragment and move it to a separate
> track with its own EQ and level. I find this a lot
> easier than using automation.
>
> Ciao,
>   

Full ACK and in addition I would use a subgroup for the channel of the 
regular track and for the channel of the track of the copied fragment.

Even if heavy mixing is required, e.g. for an audio collage I guess it's 
more musical to do such heavy mixing with an external (not necessarily 
analogue) mixing console.

Some kind of heavy mixing for current chart music needs automation that 
isn't possible by Linux now, if this is needed it can be done by 
recording the different mixes and then by piecing together this 
recordings, because this kind of music itself is pieced together.

No doubt about it, it would be good to have automation similar to the 
automation by proprietary MacOS and Windows applications, but to be 
fair, on MacOS and Windows this usually is done by all-in-one 
applications and not the modular way. E.g. muting and unmuting reverb 
etc. is harder to "automate" by Linux using several applications. IMO 
such effect mixing isn't done very often, just for a few songs and there 
are several tricks to avoid the need of automation. Perfect automation 
is useful, but not needed.

Ralf



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